1 post tagged “norman mailer”

For me Philip Roth is the greatest living American Novelist but many believe Norman Mailer has that title. I was lucky to see a talk a couple of years ago where Mailer was interviewed as part of a literary festival. My first experience of him as a writer was the novel ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’. It’s a crime novel about a writer with a penchant for drink and women. The main character has alcohol induced amnesia and tries to piece back the events over the previous days that culminated with him coming round with his car drenched in blood. It was my first experience of a writer’s muscular style that breathes life into characters in a way that I can think no other writer does except perhaps for Hemingway. I can’t help think that Mailer (like Hemingway) is of an era that we will no longer see again, part anachronism, part hero, part cliché (that they have created). The writer as a character in his own novels, a war veteran, a boxer, aggressive, hard-drinking, an attempted murderer (?), straight-talking and ultimately flawed. He spoke during the event I attended in his New York drawl and answered questions with great humour and clarity and captivated the audience (even those that didn’t want to be captivated). Towards the end of the event a woman stood up and levelled the claim that his attitudes towards women in his writing made him a ‘woman hater’ to which he replied “If I hated women so much why would I have been married 6 times”. I remember thinking that in the humour of his answer there was something truthful, brilliant and wrong. He was definitely an original and of his time. I don’t think we’ll see the likes of him again.